He had spent over a week cooped up in his apartment once the news broke out and was pleased that the week had gone relatively well without a hitch.
From day one, his village was like a ghost town, but now it had escalated into something more sinister. There was dozens of them, and he wasn't sure if they were from his village or they had roamed from another place in desperate need of flesh. He wished he had made more of an attempt to flag the van down that went by a few days ago. He could see it from a distance from his bedroom window on the main road, only a hundred yards away from his apartment.
With food getting short, he bravely ran in the dark and decided to try and hitch a ride but once he was on the main road, the van was in no mood for stopping. He tried to wave his arms as it went by in case they thought he was one of them, but by then it was too late, and he headed back with sluggish and disappointed feet to the comfort of his home, and that was when he saw his first ghoul from being outside.
It stood in his street and glared at him from a distance. He tried a 'hello', to see if he was mistaken and the thing was actually human, but all it did was alert whatever senses it had left and began to slumber in his direction. He then ran back into his apartment, locked the door and began to pray, something he hadn't done in years.
Now, it was over a week since the news of the outbreak, and exiting the main road he looked around him and all he could see was trees. He didn't know whether it was shock, fear or confusion, but he had no idea where to go. He began to turn his walk into a gentle jog. His jogging only lasted another minute, and once again, he had to stop. Every time he turned around he began to see black trails. He looked behind him, ignoring the black trails, and had gained a reasonable advantage on his persistent follower that had probably given up. He was becoming tired, agitated, and sure that he was now hallucinating.
He bent over and placed both hands on his stomach and felt unwell. Something was happening to him; something he couldn't explain. He then stood straight, which was painful, and began to rub his tender throat. When he was five years old, he had contracted mumps. It was something that took nearly two weeks to clear up, and this felt similar. He was only five years old, but could still vividly remember the discomfort that he felt.
He felt the tingling sensation of pins and needles in his left arm, as if he had just woken up after sleeping on it for an hour. He delicately placed his hand on the affected area and could hardly feel a thing, as if he was touching a limb that belonged to someone else, despite there being a superficial wound on that very same arm.
His head spun and he half-sat and half-collapsed onto the grassy ground. He blew out his cheeks like a blowfish and released tension-filled air from his orifice. He rested his forehead on his hands and couldn't believe how hot he had become. He lifted his head straight up and cursed himself as tiredness was beginning to tease his senses. Tired? With those things only a few hundred yards away from me? I must be mad.
He grabbed hold of a branch that was hovering over him attached to the nearest tree, and tried to pull himself up. Something was wrong. He felt awful, and it felt like every bone in his body ached and throbbed with pain. He managed to stand and his legs throbbed as if he had been beaten with baseball bats. His legs felt dead, numb, and couldn't fathom why he felt so terrible. He came to the conclusion that if his admirer had decided to change its mind and began to walk toward him once again, he would probably find it hard to outrun the thing, as he was now struggling while walking in baby steps.
He sat back down once again and stared up at the sky. He glared at the shy sun—for maybe too long—that had reappeared from an over-protective grey cotton ball of a cloud, and saw the sun spinning and spinning. He then looked away and saw the hexagonal red spots dance teasingly before his eyes, before eventually disappearing for good.
He felt a small pain in his stomach and without warning threw up onto the grass, most of it being blood. In any normal circumstances, he would have panicked, but this was no normal circumstance for Dale Smythe. He looked at the lumpy pile of vomit and blood and shook his head. What was happening to him? His eyes suddenly became so heavy, that he struggled terribly to keep them open. He looked down on his T-shirt, there were now specks of blood on it from the vomiting, but he could still see the writing Slightly Damaged Human across the chest in dark blue letters as he looked down.
Still sitting, he looked at his scratched left forearm that had been received from an altercation from one of them, and laid his head against the trunk of the tree. Trying to ignore the pain through his body, he closed his eyes.
Author's Note
This was written in June 2012. The sequel was written in August 2012 straight after.
I was reluctant to release it for many reasons. The main reason was that I was astounded at the amount of apocalyptic/zombie books there were when I decided to look up WWZ for my own personal use. The more I waited around to release it, the more zombie books were released by other authors, so I just decided to go with the flow and release it in 2013, but wanted to release a few standalone novels first because I didn't want to be known as just another zombie writer.
First of all, this IS a zombie/apocalyptic tale, even though the Z word is never mentioned once in the 115,000 words within the book. The book starts with a large clutch of characters and their stories and can be hard to keep up if you're the type of reader who reads for just ten minutes a day—this is one of the reason why the chapters are reasonably short. Most of the characters come together in the end, apart from the Jack Slade character. So why introduce Jack Slade at all?
If I deleted all the chapters on Jack Slade, the story would still flow and be a nice 80,000+ read—I've tried it. (Slight spoiler alert). Without giving too much away, Mr. Slade eventually meets up with Pickle and co in book two, and in the second instalment, the reader will finally get to meet Kerry Evans and young Thomas Slade, and that's all I'm going to give away.
Secondly, this book has many character flaws, most of them intentionally. How many times have you watched a horror movie and said to yourself: Why don't they just go outside? Why don't they call the police? Why is he going down in the basement? Did David Pointer really need to check on his neighbours?
As humans, we have many flaws. And when stress or panic kicks in, our decision-making is a lot poorer. Back in 2004, I was a prison officer and was taken hostage by 12 inmates. Instead of running for the emergency door or even pressing my alarm on my radio, I simply stood there in shock and was held until an agreement was made. Now, if that were a film, you'd be screaming at the screen: "Run, you fucking idiot!" But I didn't. I just stood there like a fool. I'm human, and on that day I made a mistake.
My wife is a nurse and when we watch medical dramas, sometimes she would say: "They're doing that wrong?" or "That would never happen." Even with cop or forensic dramas, I'm sure a lot of cops or forensics watch these high profile programmes and shake their head with a smile at some of the inaccuracies. Personally, I couldn't care less, as long as a book or TV programme is not too far fetched and ridiculous, I'm fine with it, after all, it's just fiction—a form of escapism.
Like I mentioned before, about the poor decision making when in a state of panic. I decided to put some of that into Snatchers to make the characters more human. I also wanted to write something that involved real or normal people, people who worked in a prison, people who were hungover and had just finished work, etc, rather than an ex-SAS soldier waking up to the apocalypse and he just so happens to have a fully loaded Glock 17 and a AK 47 under his bed.
The scene with David Pointer 'battling' hopelessly with one of them with a hammer was something I always wanted to put in to make it more believable. Some readers might have preferred if David Pointer pulled out a Berretta and blew its brains out, but gun laws are very tight here in the UK and is almost impossible to own one, so I decided to keep the storyline more BBC, rather than Hollywood.
Although the characters discuss many situations on how this virus could have
happened, the cause of the virus itself was also in my original prologue. It was a set of headlines from over a week and gave the reader an insight on how it all started.
Then I read a blog by Zombie author, Craig DiLoue. He said: "Restrict the reader’s knowledge to that of your characters. You can hint at the big picture, tease, titillate, but you do not have to reveal everything." Then I thought about the film Dawn of the Dead, which also doesn't reveal why it was happening. And I must confess that, for me, the not knowing makes it even the more frightening. If they don't know what it is, they can't find a cure, right?
That was when I thought: Okay, the characters in the book don't know how it came about, so why should the reader. This convinced me to delete the prologue and not tell the reader where it had come from and whether it was global or not. It had been mentioned that there was pockets of incidents across the globe, but as far as the reader and characters are concerned, it's only the UK (so far) that has been brought to its knees.
Initially I was going to put the virus during the week and set one part of the story in a crèche, but I felt that that would be too hard—and too disgusting—to write. So I changed it to the weekend, to make it a little 'safer' for the reader.
Let's not forget that we really don't know what would happen in the unlikely event of something like this. Everyone seems to be an expert on something that has never happened.
What would happen with electricity, mobile phones, the Internet, etc? Does anyone really know? For sure?
Even the creation of the zombie itself has its flaws. If only their brain is working and their lower body isn't, then why do they eat? Instinct? And where does the food go? There is no peristaltic movement anymore in the stomach, so do they just eat and eventually get bloated and explode?
Going back to the characters, I remember watching one Z film and saw that within a day, a nurse and an odd job man suddenly became experts in firing handguns. I wanted to make mine a little more believable, hence the reason why the nervous survivors wasted about forty bullets on half a dozen Snatchers in the supermarket scene.
The story is set in my hometown that is pretty small and has zero skyscrapers at all. Stile Cop is a place that actually does exist—Google it, and you'll see the pictures—and is in the middle of nowhere, with no population and a pretty hard and steep road to walk up to, so this was the reason why I picked this destination for Pickle and co to stay. With the entrance blocked off, no noise, and a steep hill, what could go wrong?
Why didn't the characters just remain indoors?
I needed to base my characters on people that needed or had to leave and be exposed to danger, rather than characters that remained in their barricaded house. Jamie felt his and Janine's options were better outside, prisoners wanted to escape and be with their families, Jack Slade needed to be with his son, Karen Bradley was attacked in her own house by her infected fiancée and by the time she returned and had the courage to kill him, her street was heaving with the things forcing her to go on the run. Most of the people in the town had decided to stay indoors, hence the reason why the roads were quiet.
If I based my four sets of characters about families being stuck in a house, there'd be little action and a pointless storyline. If the characters didn't need to leave, we'd have a book about a family who simply barricaded themselves in their house and then have a cup of tea and a game of scrabble while the Snatchers walked past their front window. Sounds good? Would you read that if that were in the synopsis? Probably not.
Just imagine it. Chapter 13: Waiting for the virus to blow over, David and Davina Pointer were playing scrabble. David landed a triple word score and beat Davina, while Isobel was in the kitchen eating a cheese sandwich. Chapter 16: This time the Pointers got out the monopoly board—can you see where I'm going with this?
Honesty: Okay, there's nothing new in this book that you probably haven’t already read. No new slant on the Z genre—nothing! And let's be honest, if I did put out a new slant on this genre and gave the zombies/snatchers the ability to fly, sparkle or go vegetarian, the purists would come looking for me and put my balls in a jar.
The book is all about the characters and how they behave and interact with other survivors in such a dire situation, as well as their mannerisms and speech. It's important to give characters different traits to make them 'real' and less two-dimensional. For example, Karen Bradley empties her nose now and again and uses the word 'Cocksucker'. Pickle spits now and again, occasionally winks at people and has slurred speech and words like: you, my and of end up becoming: yer, ma, and o' when he strings a sentence together, and so on. Jack Slade sometimes has humorous thoughts, KP occasionally likes to stroke his little beard and little Isobel would sometimes bite her bottom lip after asking a question.
This is a book simply for the reader to escape reality and have a bit of fun. Don't take it too seriously. Like I said before, this was written back in 2012, and I was reluctant to release it by the time I had finished the first draft of the sequel. I had a think about it and thought that it seemed a little silly to write two Z books (205,000 words altogether) and not release them. So now I have.
Now, I know a lot of readers don't like being 'duped' into buying a second instalment of a book, which happens a lot with self-publishers, but in truth, it's the only way some of us can make a little money. However, with this book, you can read Snatchers as a standalone novel and be done with it. This is one of the reasons why I didn't want to end the book on a frustrating cliffhanger.
Finally, if you enjoyed it, great, there is more to come and the story continues with Pickle and Karen, among many other old and new characters.
I wish you all the best.
Shaun.
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Table of Contents
Copyright
Other books available
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Chapter Twenty Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty One
Chapter Thirty Two
Chapter Thirty Three
Chapter Thirty Four
Chapter Thirty Five
Chapter Thirty Six
Chapter Thirty Seven
Chapter Thirty Eight
Chapter Thirty Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty One
Chapter Forty Two
Chapter Forty Three
Chapter Forty Four
Chapter Forty Five
Chapter Forty Six
Chapter Forty Seven
Chapter Forty Eight
Chapter Forty Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty One
Chapter Fifty TwoJ
Chapter Fifty Three
Excerpt from Author " Snatchers Book 2 "
Author's Note
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Snatchers (A Zombie Novel) Page 34
